Worst dad ever? The Zodiac killer

I don’t remember the exact year — sometime in the early ’80s — but I swear there was a prank that scared the My Buddy and Kid Sister out of every boy and girl in the Bay Area.

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Just a macabre game of “dress up?”

Some time close to Halloween, someone sent a letter to the police or the media pretending to be the Zodiac Killer, who stalked the Bay Area in the late ’60s and ’70s and then seemingly disappeared. Well, the letter claimed the killer would “run down” trick or treaters that year.

Looking back, I suppose my parents weren’t as scared as I was, considering they wound up letting us go out that night — or maybe they just didn’t love us as I had always assumed. Either way, I remember walking around town for an hour or two, the idea of endless free candy just barely eclipsing the fear that jolted me every time I saw a pair of headlights.

“Kevin McLean, the former law partner of the late Melvin Belli, said he has led a two-year investigation into claims by Deborah Perez that her father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, was the Zodiac killer. Hendrickson, who lived in Orange County, died in 1993 of cancer.

Perez described Hendrickson as a carpenter, a father of six, with a violent nature. ‘He was a Jekyll and Hyde,’ McLean said of Hendrickson. ‘He was nuts. He set out to kill people. Some of these killings were not random.'”

Apparently Hendrickson told her daughter that the gunfire she heard on these lovely little father-daughter adventures was actually just firecrackers, and the people who she saw running around scared? I don’t know. That seems more difficult to explain.

Part of me believes her story — because let’s face it, if you’re crazy enough to kill people, you’re crazy enough to bring a kid along for the ride. But part of me thinks there’s something else going on here.

How about you? Does it sound possible that the Zodiac would have a 7-year-old daughter as an unknowing accomplice?